Is marriage healthy for the black family?
I want to first say that I agree that marriage is healthy for us and so is raising a family together. If the relationship isn’t healthy then I would venture to wonder about the root causes that are persisting to create an environment that would allow such a relationship to flourish.
What is your role in the situation?
Everyone is capable of sabotaging a relationship that is involved either directly or indirectly. What is prudent is that the two main people involved know that they control the fate of the relationship and what ever comes out of it. Working together and understanding the needs of one another is most important. I can sit on my high horse and point the finger at her and say this and that is her fault and she can do the same to me.
Realizing that type of behavior will get you no where is taking a step closer to resolution and growth. The real questions that we need to ask ourselves is:
What have I done to aid the situation?
What have I done to make it better?
How have I not been selfish?
Could I have done anything differently?
Only with being introspective can we show the other person that we are thinking of our roles in the relationship. When blaming one or the other person, things can get defensive/offensive quickly and the idea is to learn to work as a team.
There is too much going for self in our community. I’m surprised we even call it a community because the root of the word has to do with being communal with each other. And there is a LACK of that.
I can’t sit here and profess to know what is ailing the black community/family and how to solve it. But I can say that I do wonder: Why it is that people who can decide to love one another one day can end up hating and being hurt by the other another day. Why is it that we can get together and make kids but not take the time to get ourselves together mentally, financially, and whatever other standard that should be self imposed prior to starting a family? Why is it that it seems that when the going gets tough, that things fall apart and folks throw in the towel?
Yes its true that black women are historically leading the household of single parent homes. I would like to inform some of you that her counter part - The black male - doesn’t always falls into the category of laziness and whatever negative stereotypes that we and other groups view us with.
There happens to be a percentage of women that believe that its quite alright to raise a child with the father not being in the picture. She will leave the family in entirety or she will just take the kid because she knows that the kid is a way to extract income from the father. She doesn’t truly care about the destruction of the family because she doesn’t really know what a family is. She doesn’t care about the kid not having his father in his life or how the courts can destroy the father’s life. All she cares about is herself and self gratification.
Men from all groups have historically been out of the home. This is bad. There are many reasons too numerous to really write about in one post. (I think that if both parties had as much to lose as the other does then the prevalence of divorce and single parent headed households would diminish.)
But there are men that wanted to be there and have that stable family life. There are men that want to be good husbands, and good fathers. There are men that want to break the cycle of foolishness that plague the black family but for whatever reason it doesn’t happen.
We should get some credit too.
Do you agree?
